Q: What happened to Save As?

"Honestly, I had no idea that I've been "abusing" a Mac command since 1988. (LOL, what exactly does that mean?) Here all this time I thought I was simply getting my work done in an efficient manner when I used Save As. Silly me!"

When I say "abusing", I was referring to the scores of Macintosh developers who implemented their own overloaded DLOGs (dialogue boxes), their own MDEFs (menu definitions), and their own various custom controls for changing the ways that the standard "Save As…" command works.  All 20 years in the making.

"I wouldn't presume to tell you that your way of working on a Mac is screwed up. If you told me 'This is the method that works for me' I would accept your statement...even if your way was different from mine."

As if it isn't the method that works for me... otherwise I wouldn't be using it.  And who are you to judge me on how I work and whether it's screwed up or not?!  You're obviously not the best person to decide!

"Most of us have evaluated the new saving paradigm, and have come to the conclusion that the old way works better for us."

OK, then... continue using Snow Leopard and keep quiet.  Meanwhile, there's no reason for you to ask what happened to the command, because the rest of us, including myself, know it's gone by the way of the dodo.

—tonza

Congratulations on a perfectly marvelous set of non-answers! Very typical of all I've engaged in this discussion over these many months.

tonza wrote:

 

"Honestly, I had no idea that I've been "abusing" a Mac command since 1988. (LOL, what exactly does that mean?) Here all this time I thought I was simply getting my work done in an efficient manner when I used Save As. Silly me!"

 

When I say "abusing", I was referring to the scores of Macintosh developers who implemented their own overloaded DLOGs (dialogue boxes), their own MDEFs (menu definitions), and their own various custom controls for changing the ways that the standard "Save As…" command works.  All 20 years in the making.

And all completely irrelevant to the discussion we're having in this thread. What everyone else except you is interested in is the user experience of having vs. not having a Save As command — not all of this geek under-the-hood stuff.

"I wouldn't presume to tell you that your way of working on a Mac is screwed up. If you told me 'This is the method that works for me' I would accept your statement...even if your way was different from mine."

 

As if it isn't the method that works for me... otherwise I wouldn't be using it.  And who are you to judge me on how I work and whether it's screwed up or not?!  You're obviously not the best person to decide!

Huh? What you've written here baffles me, because it appears to be a rephrasing of exactly what I said in my statement. How is it that your words here apply to me, and yet not to you?

Your earlier characaterization of Save As being "outdated" and a "mindset" implies that you are making a judgment upon those who prefer to use it (not to mention your subsequent "way of the dodo" statement). The fact that you didn't even deal with the bulk of my post reinforces this view.

"Most of us have evaluated the new saving paradigm, and have come to the conclusion that the old way works better for us."

 

OK, then... continue using Snow Leopard and keep quiet.  Meanwhile, there's no reason for you to ask what happened to the command, because the rest of us, including myself, know it's gone by the way of the dodo.

I'll ignore your juvenile "keep quiet" admonition.

More to the point, you know full well that "continue using Snow Leopard" will, in time, prove to be no solution at all to this problem. As hardware ages and must be replaced, such advice will, in fact, prove impossible to implement.

There is every reason for "the rest of us" to ask what happened to Save As. As I stated (and you ignored), this command works best for us in our workflow. Indeed, it worked just fine as an integral way of working on the Mac for the past 27 years.

You don't miss it...good for you. But "I don't have a problem, so there's no way that anyone else could possibly have a problem" is a way of looking of things that's rather...well, juvenile.

This thread gives me a headache!  lol!  And, it's not because my mind is not free!  I am really pretty open-minded.  That graphic, tonza, does not help at all.  Obviously, the Mac in that graphic did have a floppy drive - for whatever reason and it's not "staggering" to imagine saving files to your floppy.

The first computer I ever used was a little Macintosh, in a classroom, and we all saved our personal files to a floppy so that the little Macintosh didn't have a bunch of student files on it.

Anyway, I agree with Dchord568, "You don't miss it...good for you. But "I don't have a problem, so there's no way that anyone else could possibly have a problem" is a way of looking of things that's rather...well, juvenile."

Well said Linda.

I am now reasonably OK with the new way of working except when I work with Preview which I use to quickly crop and reduce the size of lots of images. The new way requires more steps and therefore takes more time! Thanks Tonza for your really useful suggestion to go back to Snow Leopard which would deny me the use of the Lion features which I do like.

Automatic gear boxes have been around for decades but if I buy a new car I can have all the latest technology and still have the option of a manual gear box. That's because many people prefer them, and the manufacturers do not insist on a "one size fits all" policy.

Over the years the unmentionable MS have tended to adopt concepts developed by Apple. Let's see if they copy the "save a version" concept or will they also have an "aversion" to it?

Hi:  guess we are back...

just tried to use numbers then as a result of my experience and new revelations with versions etc...I tried pages and the same thing happened.

I opened a file files that had been sitting around for a while.   hit space bar and then the following window opened up..    same thing in pages...

try it and see what happens.

unlock duplicate and the save with the rename.   many extra steps..    but I who love the old save as must say they have protected me  

wonder how pixelmator does this...   but I have no old files to test with.....

by the way the GRAB utility by apple has been updated to Versions..... 

once again my image did not show up in previous comments...  here it is hopefully...  l

>give experienced users the option to disable it and remain with the saving scheme that worked just fine for 27 years.

RIGHT ON!

/okn

You can disable this here in Time Machine preferences, since Auto-Save and Versions uses Time Machine services to do its job:

Cheers!

—tonza

tonza wrote:

 

You can disable this here in Time Machine preferences, since Auto-Save and Versions uses Time Machine services to do its job:    

Locking a file is actually the last remnant of things working "normal". It looks like an afterthought: when someone decided to force autosave on users it turned out how convoluted idea it was and someone else came up with auto-locking to try to fix it.

I set mine to lock the files asap, i.e. after 1 day so I have control over whether or not it is saved. Why isn't there an option to lock "right away after closing"? Just because, I suppose.

If you don't lock a file, every time you open it, it is altered and saved—even if the alteration only applies to "last-saved" date. This makes looking for a file by last-saved a nightmare.

"Congratulations on a perfectly marvelous set of non-answers! Very typical of all I've engaged in this discussion over these many months."

Oh, the answers are there alright... you just don't want to see them.  Go through the thread again for my responses and read them.  Warning: you may need to do some thinking.

"And all completely irrelevant to the discussion we're having in this thread. What everyone else except you is interested in is the user experience of having vs. not having a Save As command — not all of this geek under-the-hood stuff."

This geek under-the-hood stuff matters because it's what affects the user experience.

When third-party developers write software that introduces bad ideas, then firstly, you have to put up with it and learn it, no matter how bad the ideas.  And then, Apple have to take up those ideas for the rest of the architecture's lifespan just to keep these developers happy, until another opportunity arises to correct these life-long mistakes.  The best time to fix these mistakes are when you propose major API changes (ie., major version releases), because such changes mean major architectural changes to the system software.

These mistakes in development (introduced by third parties, then forced to keep these "hacks" going by Apple engineering) have not been agressively dropped in the past because, well, Apple was a much smaller company then (particularly when System 7 was introduced), with fewer resources (engineers) to proactively promote their design fixes and new ideas to where they should have headed... instead, languishing under third-party developers' demands.  Back then, Apple couldn't afford to design their own systems the way they wanted, because they'd lose the support necessary to continue selling their machines and paying their engineers.

Now, Apple is in a much better position to make the kind of systems that they invented for themselves some 17 years ago with the Newton OS, where using solid state memory, self-management and object-oriented software technologies demanded that old ideas be thrown out with the trash because they no longer work.

And why do they no longer work?  Well, take a look at iOS devices today, and any Mac that has solid state non-volatile memory as its replacement for the venerable disk drive, and it makes more sense when you consider that emulating a disk in non-volatile memory is a pretty stupid idea—it wastes storage space, isn't very fast, and prevents new systems from being what they are otherwise capable of.

Yes, you may not appreciate all this geek under-the-hood stuff, but some people do.  And in a few years when Macs work more like iOS devices today, people will be appreciating these advances even more.

Every Mac system release that Apple has worked on in the last 10 years has had to live within split personalities: preserving the previous (n – 1) generation APIs for apps that do things in older ways, and the current generation APIs for introducing more efficient, more effective and more useful ways of doing things, since for various reasons, older technologies are no longer relevant to the kind of systems that are being built out of some of the most amazing hardware technologies to date.  For this decade, that technology is solid state non-volatile storage that will make the entire concept of a disk filing system redundant.  Say goodbye to HFS Plus in future... because it's not going to be needed.

"Your earlier characaterization of Save As being "outdated" and a "mindset" implies that you are making a judgment upon those who prefer to use it (not to mention your subsequent "way of the dodo" statement). The fact that you didn't even deal with the bulk of my post reinforces this view."

That's not my statement nor my judgement.  That's Apple's.  It just so happens that I agree with this statement and judgement.

"More to the point, you know full well that "continue using Snow Leopard" will, in time, prove to be no solution at all to this problem. As hardware ages and must be replaced, such advice will, in fact, prove impossible to implement."

And the penny drops.  That's what I have been trying to tell you for MONTHS!

You have been flogging a dead horse for way too long.  Time to look for other ways to tackle your problem, while you still have time.

And incidentally, third-party developers will be going through the usual cycle of trying new technical avenues provided by Apple and sending them feedback on issues that matter.  I'm sure that Apple will respond to that feedback as their system software is refined to solve the little problems that EVERYONE has, not just yours.

"There is every reason for "the rest of us" to ask what happened to Save As. As I stated (and you ignored), this command works best for us in our workflow. Indeed, it worked just fine as an integral way of working on the Mac for the past 27 years."

OK, you can ask "what happened", but you're imposing more than that.  You are imposing that any change in ideas, techniques or procedures should run by you first before the rest of us get to see what could be done better and at lower cost.

"You don't miss it...good for you. But "I don't have a problem, so there's no way that anyone else could possibly have a problem" is a way of looking of things that's rather...well, juvenile."

I have said that I understand and prefer Apple's new changes to Lion in file and process management, and that these operating system technologies have been long overdue.  But I never said that "there's no way that anyone else could possibly have a problem".  Rather, all I'm saying is that there is no solution to your problem, and here's why.  I dare say that in all your efforts in delivering your rather interesting style of remarks to me in particular, you still haven't some to a solution to your problem, have you?

I can confidentally speculate this: Apple's future system releases are going to head away from the age-old concepts of 30-year-old micromanagement and into a new era of fault-tolerant personal computing.  And I for one don't want to see this development thwarted... not again.

—tonza

Thank you to elol for pointing this out with graphics.  I believe I read this somewhere on this great discussion!  But, it helps. Also, I agree with you raftr.

Don't know when (for it's not if, eventually like raftr says, we'll be forced to go on - lol!), but I don't feel quite so bad about going on to Lion.  But for now, that SL is working (perfectly, might I add), I'll stick with it.

thanks

"Locking a file is actually the last remnant of things working "normal". It looks like an afterthought: when someone decided to force autosave on users it turned out how convoluted idea it was and someone else came up with auto-locking to try to fix it."

To tell you the truth, I don't know why there is such a feature to automatically lock a file after some time period.  Maybe they wanted some excuse to use the nouchg flag on UNIX files or something.  Who knows.

"If you don't lock a file, every time you open it, it is altered and saved—even if the alteration only applies to "last-saved" date. This makes looking for a file by last-saved a nightmare."

Yes, it depends on whether apps have made changes to memory objects associated with the storage pool... even if it is a one byte change.  I call this a bug on the app's part—if a user has not changed any aspect of a document since opening it, the open operation alone should not constitute a change.  Well-behaved applications should not change the modification dates of files if the documents haven't actually changed.  As a precaution, I guess, Apple decided to throw in this "hack" to give developers time to fix their apps.

That's what it looks like to me.

—tonza

"Most of us have evaluated the new saving paradigm, and have come to the conclusion that the old way works better for us."

 

OK, then... continue using Snow Leopard and keep quiet.  Meanwhile, there's no reason for you to ask what happened to the command, because the rest of us, including myself, know it's gone by the way of the dodo.

Why does anybody waste their time debating with tonza?  He obviously wants the privilege of having only the menu commands that meet with his approval and those of us who would prefer to have a different menu command should go back to using Snow Leopard.

So, let's try this analogy.  You go into a restaurant and the waiter hands you two menus:  the regular one and another one with tonight's specials.  You don't see anything on the specials that you like, so you go back to the regular menu and you order the Caesar Salad you have enjoyed there for years.  Someone else at the table orders from the daily specials.  The kitchen serves up both.   What's wrong with that?

Now you go back the same restaurant a week later and you find that Caesar Salad is no longer on the regular menu.  The chef decided that he doesn't want to offer it any more.  Lots of people are asking for it, but he has decided that it's time to move on to other kinds of salads.  Yes, he still has lettuce and all the other ingredients in the kitchen, he just doesn't think you should be able to have Caesar Salad any more.  If you want Caesar Salad, you can go somewhere else.  The restaurant owner has a place next door that still serves Caesar Salad and a competitior across the street serves it too. 

I'd like to know, how exactly does the preservation of Save As "thwart development"  ???

No, I take that back. it's not something I want to know if learning means I have to endure another pedantic, self-righteous scolding from people who are blindly devoted to anything cutting edge with no regard for the productivity costs of progress made at a faster pace than necessary.

Kudos, Dennis!  Well said!  I like the analogy.

Umm... that's overly simplistic... even if it is a nice little analogy.

"I'd like to know, how exactly does the preservation of Save As "thwart development"???"

Because you cannot support automatic saving with "Save As..." as it used to exist.  The concept is that the kernel—not the user—is responsible for the management of processes, and this has to be doable without the cost of data loss (ie., the kernel has to tell apps to save their data at a moment's notice, and without interruption).  "Save As…" cannot cater for this.

—tonza